A and B? Imaginary. It's two sides of the same thing.
Psychological work works with reflexes the human body has (not purely physical ones)...the need for "support" from an opponent, the fear of pain and not knowing where you are, the confusion when you know something is going wrong and can't figure out what is actually happening to you. These are fears that people have, and you can exploit them in combative situations.
Here - stand someone up, come up from behind, and whack them between the shoulder blades. Tell me you can't predict where they go. There's physical work.
Now have the same person standing the same way, but come from behind and put a hand over their eyes. Doesn't matter if they can see or not, it's annoying. Now whack them between the shoulder blades. Not only will you get a bigger reaction, but about twice as many new targets will pop up. Nobody likes to be cut off between steps 1 and 2 of the OODA cycle over and over again - it makes people freeze up, makes their muscles tense up, makes their minds afraid of not knowing where to move or what to do. Now laugh while you put your hand across their eyes and scream BOO right before you hit them in the back.
That's not the only kind of psychological work, of course, but it's what a lot of people think of. More reflex work and creating fear and helplessness than anything else. What I think of as 'real' psychological work can be seen in almost all good AikiJJ - when someone is in a very confused state, even a small touch will IMMEDIATELY be categorized as a big potential influence. It's up to you to make them see it as support, in which case they put their balance onto it and you take it away, or as a threat, in which case their body will do almost anything to avoid it, even if it's just your pinky pressing into the side of the trapezius or something like that.
The human body will (almost instantly) completely and violently take over the conscious mind when it thinks it is about to die and the mind is just getting in the way.
There's another kind of work, though. The more you play with little/no contact psychological work at full speed with full intent (IMHO the best way to train it), the more you'll come into this other weird aspect of the work. And then you'll know what it is and you'll stop asking about it on internet chatboards.
-Dave
PS - it always amazes me how people want to shoo away any discussion of more "psychic" work or equate it to other unrelated things (I hate the term, but it's NOT psychological work)...isn't it funny that almost every massively competent H2H figure from the days of feudal Japan on believe in this mysterious other part of martial work? And by competent, I don't mean "we trained real hard for 15 years and got real good and won some tournaments." I mean things more along the lines of "I've killed people who were really trying to kill me, over and over and over again, where it didn't matter how much training I had because it was still terrifying every time, etc." Funny how people who have actually lived a real martial life present a visible pattern...and yeah, there's lots of people out there trying to capitalize on it, but I still can't see a damn reason to ignore it.
PPS. I changed my mind - you CAN separate psychic and psychological. You do it by smashing the guy into unconsciousness, and then you got rid of the psychological part. Then you have reflexes and...oooooo...'psychic' work.  |